Manage your sales pipeline better to build your business

Manage your sales pipeline better to build your business

From the time a business acquires a lead, up until they close a deal - either won or lost, it is essential that they keep track of all the stages within the sales pipeline and ensure a smooth flow between them.

So what is this Sales Pipeline?
It is nothing but a systematic method that one follows to navigate between multiple stages through which a sales prospect goes - from becoming a lead to becoming a customer - and a sales pipeline helps you determine where exactly your opportunities are. Besides, it also outlines the actions that you need to perform in order to convert a prospect into a customer.

Stages in a Sales Pipeline?

There are multiple stages every sales team has, including tasks such as gathering leads and qualifying them:

1. Prospecting
It is the process by which companies attract prospects into their customer database in the hope of nurturing them through a sales process and converting them into customers. They therefore make effort to generate an interest in the prospects towards their products and services. There are various sources through which you can generate leads. Some of them include trade shows, email campaigns, social media, webforms, etc.

2. Nurturing and Qualifying
Once you have generated prospects, you will need to ensure that they are the right fit for your business. Therefore, you will need to qualify them and manage them. This is a crucial step in a sales process as it helps you prioritise the promising leads and keep them at the top of your to-do list.
3. Set Meetings and define prospect's needs
Now, in order to get to know your prospects better, or in other words, understand their requirements, better, you need to set up a meeting with them. After interacting with them on several occasions, you need to tailor your proposal to address their needs. So basically, it is crucial that you articulate how your products or services can help solve their problems.

4. Negotiate and close deal
You have done your job of understanding your prospect's needs and built a solid relationship with them. While some may be ready to purchase your products or services, in the case of other prospects, you may have to address further concerns - all of which will eventually help you provide your customers with exactly what they are looking for. After these terms and conditions are finalized, you will be in a position to close the deal - either in success or otherwise.

While most companies differ in terms of their method for follow-up, and stages in the sales pipeline. the top-level stages continue to remain the same for all.
They are:
  • Prospecting
  • Qualification
  • Proposal 
  • Closing
Benefits of a Sales Pipeline

1. Get a better understanding of the sales process
2. More efficient sales strategy
3. A better understanding of the position of each lead in the sales funnel
4. Less time spent in closing deals.

Manage your Sales Pipeline with Zoho CRM

Now that you have understood the concept of a sales pipeline and its stages, imagine managing the same without a central process in place. Defining the stages in the sales pipeline and tracking the progress in the sales process could be extremely challenging. With the help of a software like Zoho CRM, therefore, you can:
  1. Define stages in a sales pipeline
    It is crucial to define the stages in your sales pipeline early on in order to have a strong sales process as sales reps in your company will know in advance what is expected of them in order to take the lead forward through the sales pipeline and finally close the deal. This can be achieved by customising/adding values in stage field within the Deals module in Zoho CRM. For instance, imagine you run a magazine publication. You do not require some of the default values within the stage field, such as Value Proposition or Proposal. You can therefore customise or delete these fields to meet your requirements.

  2. Track your deals
    It is crucial to track your deals to get an idea of the entire progress of your deal and avoid any further errors and make better decisions in terms of your way forward. Also, it is crucial to keep track of all updates in order to avoid missing out on any vital information.

    a) Historical analysis will help you avoid repeating mistakes that may have caused you to lose deals in the past. Therefore analysing your sales stage history in Zoho CRM is crucial as it will give you the number of potentials in each stage for a specific time period.

    b) Another method of tracking your sales pipeline within Zoho CRM is by creating reports and dashboards. You will be able to track your sales trends, marketing campaigns, team performance, etc. with the help of these reports.

    c) With multiple deals within your software, trying to view each of them to determine their status could prove to be quite taxing. However, within Zoho CRM, you can view your deals in a single view with the help of kanban view. It will display the data in an organised manner.

  3. Identify priority deals to focus on

    a) If you want to locate deals that are priority (for instance, deals that are closing this month), you can use advanced filters, which is a powerful search tool that can help you extract necessary information in no time. In this case, therefore, you will be able to quickly locate deals that fit your criteria (deals that are priority) and then you can immediately follow-up on them.

    b) On the other hand, if you want the system to suggest deals that you need to prioritise, you can use Zia, Zoho CRM's data intelligence tool. Based on the trend, she will predict for you those deals that are most likely to be won. This will give you a better understanding of what to focus on. In fact, she will create a view - breaking up your deals into those which are likely to be won, lost, or those which could go either way. This will help you shift your focus onto those deals that require your attention. 

    What are your thoughts on effective sales follow up? Share your questions and opinions by commenting below. Also, feel free to suggest topics for discussion in the CRM Admins Chat Room. 


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